...And This Is Our Music
The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Published by Under The Radar
...And
This Is Our Music
The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Published by Under The Radar
Brian Jonestown Massacre leader Anton Newcombe’s words are often meant to confront, disarm, befuddle. “I’m glad John Lennon is dead,” begin the track notes to “Starcleaner,” the third song on …And This Is Our Music. Elsewhere he talks about God, drugs and sex, lots of sex. From the stage he crafts creative insults and free-associates from his pleasure centers.
But hit play on virtually any song on this eighth album from the BJM, and you’ll encounter another side of the notorious rock ’n’ roll madman. “Starcleaner,” a slow, acoustic-baroque procession sung by Matt Tow, speaks of “the greatest love we can find.” “Tschusse” is like the Odd Couple theme stretched into a funeral waltz. Bathed in melodies of misty sorrow, The Lilys’ Kurt Heasley sings Nico-like, “I’m staring at the stains / Of the tears / On the pillow / I don’t think you’ve told me just why.” Newcombe’s straight-up when he says he writes love songs.
With a handful of West Coast bands doing the psych thing, Anton says he wanted to try something more cinematic. So with yet another lineup (drummer Dan Allaire and bassist Tommy Dietrick have joined since 2001’s Bravery Repetition and Noise), he added string, horn and woodwind players, as well as guest vocalists. Many more are credited with “spiritual guidance” in the track-by-track -- people like Echo & The Bunnymen’s Will Sergeant and The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess who either “couldn’t or wouldn’t” participate.
For all its extra personnel, Music is an exercise in many instruments underplayed. Parts are clean and elegant, lingering just long enough among skeletal guitar strums to give a poignant poke in the gut. It’s a slow unfolding, punctuated with short interludes, like the spaghetti-westernized “You Look Great When I’m Fucked Up” and “Prozac Vs. Heroin Revisited,” a blippy space odyssey inspired by mushrooms… and sex.
Consistently
downbeat and patently psychedelic, …And This Is Our Music is
also thoroughly three-dimensional, a success that sucks the cliché out
of cinematic. These not-so-little love songs have layers to get lost in.